Runoff election for Greek senators set for March 28
The Elections Commission has designated Friday, March 28 for a runoff election to fill the three Greek senator positions. The runoff will be held via a virtual ballot sent by email to all Greek-affiliated students. The Commission told The Polytechnic that the runoff was called due an apparent configuration error in the Qualtrics ballot sent to Junior students that prevented their votes for Greek positions from counting properly.
This year, Junior students were only allowed to vote through the Qualtrics ballot. They were still able to receive the free GM Week mug as long as they showed proof of completion to a poll station worker.
There are three Greek senate positions in total, one for each council: the Interfraternity Council, the Rensselaer Panhellenic Council, and the Multicultural Sorority and Fraternity Council.
Ibrahim Ali ’25 and Jackson Lawrence ’26 are the only two candidates running for a Greek senator position. They are both running for the IFC senator position. No candidate has filed to run for the Panhellenic or MSFC positions.
The full EC statement sent to The Poly is as follows.
The Election Commission has been engaged in a purposeful effort over the last two years to reduce the number of technical issues associated with our electoral process. As a result of Senate legislation, passed at the beginning of last year, the Rensselaer Union Voting System was at its best state in years for this year’s election. However, the voting through RUVs does not account for the Junior class, who is conducted through a virtual ballot. The Institute has permitted us to make use of a mass survey system known as “Qualtrics” to gather votes from the Junior class, in an election safe manner. The Institute has also assigned a staff member to administrate the form survey in communication with the Union staff. This year, the Junior ballot that was sent out was not configured correctly, and as result the Greek list for the “Qualtrics” ballot that was provided was not used. The Election Commision is not aware of the reason why this happened, but this prevented the Junior ballots from counting Greek votes correctly. As such, the winner of the Greek Senator election could not be determined, and the Election Commision decided to hold a runoff, on 3/28, via virtual ballot.
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